Heroic Measures : At Critical Times, What Makes Ordinary People Do Extraordinary Things?

On Jan. 23, 1953, as he staggered into a hailstorm of bullets on a North Korean hillside, Marine Capt. Jerry Murphy became a hero.

Oblivious to the shrapnel wounds in his back, he lifted dead and wounded soldiers from a trench and carried them to safety. Murphy won the Medal of Honor and was hailed as a man who had risked his life to save others.

But it may not have been that simple. Earlier that night, he had declined to lead a platoon of men into battle, fearing the mission was foolhardy. An Irish Catholic who had been trained to always obey his superiors, he watched while other soldiers died and was wracked with guilt. Then he exploded into action, blind to the dangers around him.

Was Murphy’s charge up the hillside truly selfless--or a desperate act of penance?

“When you explore the motives of heroes, you have to search for the paradox, the contradictions in each person,” says author Michael Lesy, who profiles Murphy and other Americans who have put themselves at risk in “Rescues” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

“These people can be driven by guilt and conscience as much as anything else, and that’s true whether you’re sitting in the Persian Gulf or walking down the streets of New York City,” he says.

The issue looms large in light of the war in the Middle East. After a period in which Vietnam War veterans were either ignored or openly castigated, the United States may be ready to christen a new generation of wartime heroes--such as the American Marines who liberated Iwo Jima during World War II.

The machinery to honor these new heroes--medals, ticker tape parades and television specials--is ready and waiting. But a true understanding of what makes them tick, and who they really are, seems as elusive and as debatable as ever.

“It’s hard to unlock the chemistry that turns one person into a hero while another person holds back,” says Lesy. “But who’s to say that we won’t have a whole new group of Audie Murphys coming out of the Gulf War? Who’s to say that a young kid commanding a tank in the desert won’t be the next John F. Kennedy and become President 30 years from now?”

A slight, tightly wound man with Coke-bottle glasses, Lesy has explored the dark side of human behavior in earlier works, most notably “Wisconsin Death Trip.” That book, which examined the death obsessions, insanity and plague that ravaged a small Wisconsin town in the late 19th Century, became a cult classic.

More recently, the 45-year-old professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College in Massachusetts wrote “The Forbidden Zone,” a study of people who deal with death and dying as part of their daily work.

As with many Americans, Lesy seems rattled by the onset of war with Iraq. Curled up on a chair in his hotel room, he is bleary-eyed from staying up half the night, keeping track of events. Whatever heroic stories emerge from the gulf, the author says, there will be a psychological link between them and other legends.

People who take risks to save others--be they soldiers or ordinary individuals--face a crisis that becomes the defining moment of their lives, Lesy suggests. And how they act reflects more the people they are--the sum total of their frailties and weaknesses, their fears and hopes--than an impromptu heroic resolve.

In his book, Lesy illuminates this common thread in profiles of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, California disabled-rights activist Ed Roberts and other Americans. Two of the most fascinating stories focus on Timothy Mosher, a New York City cab driver who halted a rape in progress and was brutally slashed by the attacker, and Jane and Carl Smith, a Georgia working-class couple who have struggled to raise an autistic child.

As Lesy sees it, Mosher’s decision to rescue a female tenant in his building was fueled in part by a lifelong rage against parents, lovers and employers who had treated him with contempt. He also was haunted by the memory of watching an elderly man drown and being unable to help.

Failure and frustration were the cause of Mosher’s actions, the author says: “They enabled him to act; they compelled him to act. If he hadn’t been so unhappy, if he hadn’t felt so trapped, he wouldn’t have saved someone else. Because he was trapped, he freed another.”

By contrast, the Smiths were driven by pure love for their son. Carl and Jane don’t have much to show in this world: He cleans toilets in a General Motors plant, where he’s worked for 27 years, and she works in a Wendy’s hamburger outlet. But no matter how much they have struggled, they couldn’t imagine abandoning their child, who has developed cancer.

In the last scene of the book, Jane Smith comforts her 21-year-old son, who must undergo a scan in the iron belly of a magnetic resonance imaging machine. Holding his hand, she straps herself onto a board alongside him, and together the mother and child slide into the darkened tunnel.

“If you want to look in a crowd and find the person who is going to help someone else, look at someone who’s been damaged,” says Lesy. “People do these things not in spite of their frailties, but because of their frailties. For some people, disabilities are a form of great strength. It’s a key characteristic of many heroes.”

That may come as news to millions of Americans, however, who routinely put such celebrities as Madonna, Clint Eastwood and Wayne Gretzky atop their list of “heroes” in one survey after another. The public lists such figures along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others and rarely distinguishes between them, according to Frank Farley, a University of Wisconsin psychologist who has conducted extensive surveys on the subject.

More important, there is comparatively little attention paid to the everyday or “episodic” hero, the person who rushes into a burning building to save people and several weeks later blends back into the crowd, Farley says. Although there are organizations, such as the Andrew Carnegie Hero Fund in Pittsburgh, Pa., that regularly honor such people, few Americans put these individuals atop their “most admired “ lists.

Millions of people, for example, praised Lenny Skutnik, a federal employee who plunged into the icy waters of the Potomac River in Washington to save lives after the 1982 crash of an Air Florida jet. In California, the media showered tributes on the members of three East Los Angeles families who in 1986 helped capture Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker.”

Today, these individuals live quiet, anonymous lives, far from the spotlight. Jerry Murphy, for example, works at a Veterans Administration post in Albuquerque, N.M.; attention is rarely paid to his exploits. Soon after he returned from Korea, the residents of his hometown of Pueblo, Colo., named a street after him, and a flurry of reporters interviewed him. But then the interest died down, in part because Murphy wanted it that way.

“I had a friend who counseled me to be careful because of what happened to the image of some guys from the war, like Audie Murphy, where there was all this commercialization,” he says. “So I tended to ignore the publicity, and soon people just left me alone. I was able to get on with my life.”

Although there may be disagreement over the definition of heroism , Lesy and other observers pretty much agree on what a hero is not. They reject as a Hollywood fantasy the stereotypical notion of someone nobly laying down his or her own life for others. Ellen Langer, a Harvard University professor of social psychology, says that scenario is a product of our imaginations.

In most cases, she suggests, would-be heroes either calculate that they will be able to pull off a rescue without harm to themselves or they are driven by cues from childhood, responding automatically to a cry for help.

“If a man sees someone trapped in a car on the freeway and he goes to rescue them, he doesn’t say to himself, ‘Chances are I won’t be able to pull her out, but I’ll do it anyway because her life is worth more than my own,’ ” says Langer. “From a clinical perspective, that would be bizarre. The reason you’d do this is because you know your own competence, and you estimate that you’d have enough time to go in and save someone.”

Others ascribe more lofty motives to rescuers. Based on a pioneering study of about 2,000 Christians who hid and protected Jews from Nazi persecution in Europe, Eva Fogelman, a New York social psychologist, says these heroes did what they did because of genuine altruism.

After hundreds of interviews, she concludes that feelings of human decency motivated most of the rescuers, instead of an ideological hatred of the Nazis. They took these risks because “many of them had parents who as role models were themselves altruistic, who helped people . . . and early on they learned tolerance for people who were different from them.”

Those same motivations are seen today, she adds, in the actions of Kuwaiti citizens who hid American and European hostages from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s troops after the Aug. 2 invasion. They also have surfaced among those Americans in Tucson, Ariz., and other cities who have given sanctuary to refugees from El Salvador, Fogelman says.

While the reasons for taking risks may vary greatly, virtually all heroic acts have a far-reaching impact on our culture, Lesy says. They become democratic parables, life lessons that instruct millions of people. As war rages in the Persian Gulf, the myth-making machinery has already swung into action, based on an old, old story.

“With Kuwait, we’re bailing out the little guy, and Hussein is the bully who kicks sand in his face. Now, the little prince may have $50 billion, but that’s another question,” he says.

Will the story have a happy ending?

“When the deal goes down, we’re going to find out a lot of interesting things about this generation of soldiers,” Lesy says. “No one should have to face what they’re going to face. God forbid they should have to face it.”